


all the pretty girls go out on saturday night

by orphan_account



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types, Pocket Monsters: Sword & Shield | Pokemon Sword & Shield Versions
Genre: Being a teenager is hard, Explicit Language, F/M, and nobody understands
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:07:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21984169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: The Pokémon League of Galar requests the pleasure of your company at the Grand Inaugural Ball to celebrate the crowning of Gloria MacCrae as the 56th Galarian League Champion.
Relationships: Beet | Bede/Yuuri | Gloria
Comments: 15
Kudos: 120





	1. Chapter 1

“Alright,” Gloria announces to Opal’s parlor like she’s addressing a wallpapered war room, brandishing a wax-sealed card in her hand like a broadsword. “Emergency meetin’ convened to discuss THIS nonsense, right here, right now.”

“THIS nonsense” is -- bold and impressive and _aggressively_ formal, colored Important People Black with glossy, golden calligraphy. It issues orders about the attendees, the place, the time, the attire. It commands her to direct issues and media inquiries to the board’s very proper, very official media departments.

The worst of it, she thinks, reads:

_The Pokémon League of Galar requests the pleasure of your company at the Grand Inaugural Ball to celebrate the crowning of Gloria MacCrae as the 56th Galarian League Champion._

“Feel like it’s threatenin’ me,” Gloria says, tossing the invitation on the coffee table, where it softly settles on top of Marnie’s and Hop’s. Bede, she notes, lingers over his, turning the cardstock around in his hands. “‘Get ta Wyndon or get fucked.’”

“Is this it? I was actually quite busy doing something important, you know. Some of us, at least, have _duties._ ” Bede places his invitation on the table next to his teacup, prim and orderly. “If I’d known you were only going to complain about a simple party I wouldn’t have let you in.”

“It’s not really _simple,_ though.” Marnie thoughtfully hovers over the platter of biscuits left by Opal before selecting a ginger digestive and dunking it in her tea. “They only hold it when there’s a new Champion. It’s been a decade so obviously it’s gonna be a thrasher.”

“Right,” Hop agrees, nodding with the enthusiasm, Gloria thinks, of a boy that has exactly zero formal obligations or duties at an event as importantly-titled as _The Grand Inaugural Ball_. “It’ll be fun! They make a huge production out of it, there’s gonna be some ceremony stuff and a formal dance and a dinner and live shows and--”

“Hold on.” He holds on. Gloria fords ahead. “Formal dance? _Formal_ dance?”

“Do you think you’ll be getting an informal dance at a black tie event?” Bede’s face is _irritatingly_ calm, still as water, and she wonders if he’s gotten better at hiding or if she’s gotten worse at the reading.

“Nope,” she says. “No. Absolutely no. I’m no’ goin’.”

“You have to.” Marnie has just the tiniest hint of a smile propping up the corner of her mouth. Gloria is getting good at reading Marnie’s mild facial expressions and thinks that this one is especially smug and infuriating. “The Champion always takes the first dance. It’s _your_ gala, Glory.”

“It’ll be fun!” Hop says this as though the repetition will make it any more true and grins, this impish _knowing_ little thing that has driven her crazy for as long as she’s known him. “You’ll get to be girly for once.”

But she doesn’t want to be girly. She wants her sweaters and her jeans and worn-out trainers. She wants a night out with her friends, her family, raising glasses of the shittiest wine and most tepid lagers until the ceiling spins and her shoulders ache. 

She does not want to dance.

She crosses her arms. “Do you know when I last wore a dress? _Fuckin’ never._ I’ve never worn a dress, let alone a _gown,_ let alone in front ae _hundreds of strangers_ at _an event in ma honor._ ”

Hop is all faux sympathy and that grin she’s going to smack off his mouth if he keeps it up for much longer. “Aw Glory, it’s not gonna be that bad. Leon told me all about his, he stepped on Melony’s toes seven times and his cape fell off in the middle of the dance floor.”

“First off: Leon was ten, aebody thinks ten year olds are cute no matter what kinda muppet they are. I’m seventeen, the windae’s closed. Second: Am no’ gonna wear a fuckin' cape. Tha’ is a line in the sand.”

“You’re a guest in Opal’s home,” Bede says, taking a carefully measured sip of his tea. “Mind your language.”

“I’ll mind _your_ language.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. It’s complete nonsense.”

“Alright, alright, _calm down_ ,” Marnie says. Her lungs aren’t laughing, but her soft eyes are. “We need to focus on what’s important here.”

Gloria flops down with a long-suffering sigh into an overstuffed, floral-patterned armchair. “I dunno how to dance.”

“Bede’s a very competent ballroom dancer, you know.”

The wind feels like it’s been sucked out of the room, and Opal fills the parlor doorway as though she’s teleported with a smile as polite as it is agitatingly _coy._ Gloria’s gran was never so mischievous. (But, she thinks, she was never so _sìthiche_ either.) She takes four pairs of eyes turning on her with the relish of an old hat stage actress. “I’d daresay he’s among the most naturally talented I’ve instructed in my long life,” she adds, “though for _some_ reason he’s declined to pursue mastery.”

Gloria looks to Bede then, whose face is no longer quite so lake-surface serene--it’s taking on a delightful tinge of pink, in fact--as he murmurs into his teacup: “It was part of your training, so I obliged for exactly as long as necessary. That’s all.”

Hop grins like a shark with a meal while Marnie tucks a small smile into her own drink. “Is ballroom dancing important for a fairy-type trainer, Ms. Opal?” he asks, all the picture of pastoral innocence. Bede leans into his hand, covering his brow.

Opal nods. “It _is_ incredibly important. Ballonlea’s leader should always be graceful and light on their feet. In fact...”

And then Gloria feels her eyes on her, that dissecting sort of stare that dips under the skin and starts to sift through all her bones and words and thoughts, like checking her for atomic flaws that might make her _unsuitable_. The pause goes on for a full second too long before Opal continues: “Why doesn’t Bede give you lessons? You’re a coordinated girl; it shouldn’t take you long at all to pick up. And you two get along so well.”

Bede looks for all the world like he wants nothing more than to say _no_ , to stand up and take his teacup and saucer to the kitchen, to hoist himself out the window and vanish into the fae woods without another word. (It’s the little victories that count, she thinks -- he flushes from nose to cheek to ear, too pale to hide his blood.) But Opal’s looking at him _pointedly,_ and he can’t rally the needed strength to test her will.

“...Fine. I will give exactly one week’s worth of lessons. And if you somehow can’t manage to pick it up by then, you’ll have to look elsewhere for your miracle.”

Gloria smiles in a way that is entirely too gleeful, too Purrloin. “I’m so touched you’re offerin’, Bede. Tha’ sounds perfect.”

“Really just an all-around swell guy, Bede. You’re really pullin’ through for your friend.” Hop claps him on the shoulder as he stands up to leave with a grin that could mirror Gloria’s. Bede spares him a glance -- and if looks could kill, Hop would be leaving the parlor in a dripping wicker basket. 

Marnie, conjuring equivalent boldness, lays a soft hand on Bede’s knee as she stands, too, and gives it three staccato pats. “Oh, make that face all you want, you’ll have fun. Don’t get a cob on, you’ll be fine.”

“The tea was lovely, Ms. Opal,” Gloria says, the last to get up to her feet, following Hop and Marnie out of the parlor with a too-long, too-loud laugh, leaving Bede alone to sink into the floral sofa, rubbing at his forehead.

Opal eases herself slowly into a chair and pours herself a cup of tea. “I’m glad you’ve made such pleasant friends, dear.”

Bede holds his cup in both hands and looks down through the pale chamomile tea liquor to the white porcelain at the bottom. “You and I have very different definitions of pleasant,” he says.

He could think of a few more ways to describe them, but to his credit, he minds his language.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> blame the bederia discord for this one, i take no responsibility


	2. Chapter 2

Hop suits Wyndon more, she thinks. Really.

It takes a month before she’s convinced to move from the farm into the Champion’s penthouse suite in the financial district, where the buildings block the sunset and the weekdays are manic and the businessmen are sharp like skinning knives. The board had fed her something about _permanent residence,_ powerpoint presentations on the august history, the traditions, the requirements -- blowhard Galarachs could go on and on about themselves forever. The thing that sold her was all the _flying,_ flying from Postwick to Wyndon for every shoot, every interview, every meeting _._ Feet are best on the ground; she was never one to love the sky, except in poetry.

Hop loves flying. He loves Wyndon, too, and Wyndon loves him -- he is so at home on its streets that it boggles her. He grew up with soft pastures of wooloo and 6am choring just like her, but she wonders, maybe, if it was a matter of being switched at birth. His clothes and his gait and his angles just _fit_ here, like this is where he was meant to be born. He gets out of the moving van and shoulders her boxes, and she watches him navigate down the sidewalk through the crush of morning rush hour like he’s been doing it since before he could talk. Crowds don’t part so easily for her; if she isn’t noticed as the _Champion,_ she’s just another set of brown hair and brown face and brown hands in the crowd, some dumb lost tourist. Hop glides on the slipstreams. His sense of direction is a finely-tuned instrument.

She feels jealousy like a knot in her gut and she wants it _out_ because he has so little that wasn’t his brother’s first and it feels wrong to covet it, especially when he smiles at the glass-and-metal penthouse that she hates. He smiles so broadly like every kid on Christmas morning. 

She thinks, _I’m so sorry I took this from you_.

They unpack boxes, mostly dishware and cooking pans and spices, and she makes his mother’s bhuna gosht, his favorite curry, in a kitchen that is entirely too sleek and obsidian to have ever been used by a real cook. He spears chunks of spiced mutton and chews like the most typical seventeen year old boy who’s still trying to grow into another three inches.

“I dunno how you do it, Glory. It’s _just_ like my mum’s.”

“Aye, tha’s called gettin’ the recipe fae your maw while you’re playin’ video games.”

“You don’t get it,” he says, shaking his head emphatically and smiling in maybe the only inaccessible way he has left. “So Wyndon, huh? Did you ever think you’d get to be living like a grown-up in a big city before you’re even old enough to buy beer?”

He knows this: that she’s made for the cold, for high altitudes and dirt roads and fields full of winter wheat. She gives him a look like he’s just whiffed the last question on a gameshow. “Uh, no? A fuckin’ loathe Wyndon.”

He laughs. “You? Hate the city? I’d never guessed. Growing up it was always, _Hop am gony finally hae electricity!_ and _Hop did you ken human civilization exists?!_ _I cannae wait to hae runnin’ water!”_

As long as they’ve known each other and his accent is still awful, maybe on purpose. She adores him for it. “Shite patter. Wine maw readin’ a bedtime story patter. You should write ma inaugural speech for me an’ put the room to sleep so nobody watches me dance.” She shakes her head and mirrors his grin, so fiercely full of fondness, and pats the knuckles of his hand that isn’t shoveling curry down his gullet.

“That’d be a waste, nobody can understand a word you say.”

“Oh, get right tae fuck.” She swats at the back of his hand lightly, her laughing and him eating with the dumbest, smuggest look on his face and it feels, for a tiny breathless moment, like the gym challenge never happened and they’re sidled up at his mother’s kitchen table, fighting over a basket of naan. 

She laughs until her laughter can’t hold her up anymore and she falls quiet, settling into the stillness and the odd, asymmetrical echoes that sound makes here. 

She says: “Really, Hop. Why did I do this to maself?”

Hop wipes his mouth with the back of his hand gracelessly, even with a napkin right at the side of his plate. “You’re putting way too much energy into worrying about this thing. I _promise_ it’s not gonna be that bad, and it’s _ages_ out.”

She shakes her head. “No--I mean _aye,_ but that’s no’ what I mean. I mean...All this. Why did I do _this?_ ” 

She gestures, arms wide, to the floor-to-ceiling windows that she assumes make rich people feel richer but only make her feel too seen, too exposed; she gestures to the furniture she didn’t choose, the leering of artwork on the walls picked by another set of tastes, that remind her of little spies, of someone else living in her home. Out the window, the silhouette of Rose Tower looms like a judge, bullying the skyline. 

Hop makes an _and??_ gesture, putting his fork down. He’s confused more than he is hurt, she thinks, but the little signs are there: the crinkling at the corners of his eyes, the knitting of his brow. “What are you talking about? This place is _amazing_. You’re in the heart of the coolest city in Galar, everyone knows who you are, you get to live in this _palace..._ You’re Champion. This is what everyone dreams about when they start the challenge.”

“It’s what you dreamed about.”

A slow dawning realization washes over him and the angles of his face tuck in tightly. “Glory, no. We’ve gone over this like...half a dozen times since the semi-finals. It’s not your fault you’re the better trainer.”

“It’s no’ about that.” She feels petulant, now; clutches the hem of her shirt, balls it up in her knuckles. “You were _made_ for this, an’ I shat on your dreams for _what?_ For...photoshoots when I canna’ stand havin’ my picture taken? For a city I hate? I go’ here bein’ the best battler, and the only place I’ve been doin’ that since the season ended is on Chattr. Folk think Leon threw the match, an’ I just.”

She pauses, pinches the bridge of her nose.

“I’m _sorry_. You’ve go’ the prettiest dreams, Hop, you always have an’ I love it about you, an’ I fucked them up for _this._ ”

Hop’s chair squeals (awful, she thinks, so awful on the concrete), and he moves over to her side of the table and wraps her up in a hug that is so much broader and bigger than it used to be. He used to be slight, half her frame, but he’s moving up into a larger skeleton and he reminds her so much of her older brothers now. “Shhh. Hush. Stop talkin’ nonsense. The great part about dreams is that you can’t really screw them up, you just get new ones.”

She grasps onto the fur of his jacket collar and buries her face into it. 

“You _earned_ this, Glory. Hate it or not, you fought for it and you won it. Leon didn’t give it to you, you didn’t steal it from me. It’s yours, end of, and nobody can take it from you unless they beat you on the pitch.” He rubs her back in slow circles. “If you want to do right by me, then just _enjoy_ it, silly dances and all.”

“ _Ughhhhhhh,”_ she groans into his jacket, then detaches. “Alright, alright. Silly dances. Poor Bede, I was gonna make him pure happy lettin’ him off the hook.”

Hop gives her a properly shit-eating grin, one broad hand ruffling her wild hair before she can escape. “ _Speaking_ of things you’re doing to yourself for no reason.”

She balls up a napkin and throws it at his dumb smug face, and the two of them laughing together makes the echoes start to sound a bit more right.

* * *

When she shows up at the Ballonlea gym for her first dance lesson, Bede isn’t there.

An older woman, plain and dun-blonde with little crows’ feet nesting by her eyes, stands there instead, folding towels and arranging bottles of water on a little folding table as a spritzee chirps on her shoulder. There’s a victrola that looks like it’s been wheeled out directly from Opal’s study. She looks vaguely familiar.

“Annette?” Gloria asks. “I remember you. Fae the gym challenge.”

“Good memory,” she says with a small, soft smile. “Not to jump right into the thick of it, but are you ready for your lesson?”

“Aye, just.” Gloria pauses, fiddling with the sleeves of her sweater. “No Bede?”

Annette looks like one of her aunts, she thinks -- the dignity of age combined with the vague helplessness in the face of impossible children. “He’s busy with his gym leader duties, unfortunately, and he asked if I wouldn’t mind taking over.”

“Oh, aye? Did he now?” She laughs, a polite little bark that comes out a little too humorless than she intended. “Am sure it’s somethin’ critical this late at night in the off-season.”

Annette is, if nothing else, a seasoned professional of the pitch and the stage, and seems to have finally flipped enough script pages in her head to land on the right character, someone direct and perky and vivacious and unaffected by blows, slights, and derailments. “Right! So, assuming you’re completely unfamiliar, we’re going to start off with the box step, which is fundamental to the waltz you’ll be performing…”

Gloria steps on Annette’s feet. Even a professional begins to feel it after five or six times; by the end of an hour, Gloria is sure she doesn’t have enough fingers and toes to count how many times she’s stomped on Annette like a clumsy mudbray foal, figuring its hooves out for the first time.

(Some of them are on purpose. She won’t admit it, but there’s nowhere else for her agitation to go, so she imagines a blond string bean of a boy with an attitude problem still growing into his bones and the balls of her feet come down a little too hard.)

“Why don’t we stop here for now?” Annette, consummate actress, smiles thinly. “We can pick up with the next lesson.”

Gloria mirrors the smile. “An’ will you be givin’ the lesson, or will Bede? No’ that I’m doubtin’ your skill, just. He said _he_ was gonnae teach me. Personally.”

“Did he now.” Annette’s eyebrow arches. “That certainly wasn’t the way he framed it.”

Gloria laughs, then -- long and loud, soaked up by the wood of the dance floor, the tall boiserie. Annette’s spritzee puffs out its feathers like a parrot. “Am gonna skelp him, I swear. Opal’s no’ gonna like it, but a girl has limits.”

Annette laughs too, shaking her head. “He’s been with us long enough I feel like I should be apologizing for him. He’s been getting better, but...”

“No’ quite there yet.” Gloria’s smile is slow, half-made. She cranes her head up to the coffered ceiling, closes her eyes, and wonders if other girls would cry over their hearts being so stupid, so pointless. “It just hurts to love him, sometimes. Maybe all the time.”

Annette smiles like a school counselor, folding her hands together because there’s not much else to do. “I’ll talk with Opal,” she says softly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did i say lighthearted romp? i meant that everyone's sad lmao


End file.
